Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Barbarian]

I'm not surprised. The game is for people who know jack shit about FR, much like Larian themselves.

So are you the local expert on fagrun the fantasy land of sodomy and anal orgies?

Tell us what picked so much interest in you. I assume some dissertation on Waterdeep's gay pride parades.

 

[Barbarian]

And Larian was very faithful to all the faggotry, obviously.

 

[Fedora Master]

I'm not surprised. The game is for people who know jack shit about FR, much like Larian themselves.

So are you the local expert on fagrun the fantasy land of sodomy and anal orgies?

Tell us what picked so much interest in you. I assume some dissertation on Waterdeep's gay pride parades.

I'm at least capable of opening a source book, unlike Larian

 

[Hagashager]

I'm not surprised. The game is for people who know jack shit about FR, much like Larian themselves.

Why do you care? Since when were the Forgotten Realms ever a good setting? I like BG1, 2 and Icewind Dale in spite of its setting. Ever since I was a little boy I thought the FR as a setting was completely insipid. It's been a rite of passage in my neck of the woods for fantasy fans to eventually outgrow Forgotten Realms, and then later Game of Thrones.

Being upset at bad lore in Forgotten Realms is like being upset at Avatar: The Last Airbender lore. Sure, the cartoon is fun, but fuck, man, It's just not worth it.

 

[Rhobar121]

Still better than the mess that is Golarion in pathfinder (not by much but still)

 

[Skinwalker]

Forgotten Realms is a very forgettable setting.

 

[cvv]

Forgotten Realms is a very forgettable setting.

In fact, it's been already forgotten.

 

[Barbarian]

Fun fact: my first exposure to Faerun besides the original BG series were the Drizzt books. I know now they are shitty, but I really enjoyed them as a teenager. In retrospect, compared to the whole crap nowadays they are quite wholesome.

There was a bit of very self-contained BDSM imagery in the first couple of books(underdark drow "society" related) but no other degeneracy and deviancy that I can remember. The protagonist and his father were literally rebels against drow feminazism after all.

I only figured the entire setting was devised by a literal fetishist degenerate much later. Point being that many(or most) of the works set in the forgotten realms didn't have this crap. The original Baldur's Gate games didn't have it either. It was the modding community that began shit like Imoen incest mods.

 

[cvv]

Fun fact: my first exposure to Faerun besides the original BG series were the Drizzt books

Yeah, it's the best "switch your brain off and just enjoy the ride" kind of reading in all fantasy. It's like that Ben&Jerry's Birthday Cake icecream with big chunks of actual birthday cake. Bonkers, dumb as fuck but fun.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Playing Dark Urge really shows the lack of any reason to play Evil or a non good path.

The best reward from giving into the Urge is the first one where its unavoidable. So they can give you the best item , in a slot that's very uncommon until Act 3 and everything else in the path is mediocre or not as good as the Cape. It gives you the best thing for no sacrifice

 

[AshenNedra]

Fun fact: my first exposure to Faerun besides the original BG series were the Drizzt books. I know now they are shitty, but I really enjoyed them as a teenager. In retrospect, compared to the whole crap nowadays they are quite wholesome.

There was a bit of very self-contained BDSM imagery in the first couple of books(underdark drow "society" related) but no other degeneracy and deviancy that I can remember. The protagonist and his father were literally rebels against drow feminazism after all.

I only figured the entire setting was devised by a literal fetishist degenerate much later. Point being that many(or most) of the works set in the forgotten realms didn't have this crap. The original Baldur's Gate games didn't have it either. It was the modding community that began shit like Imoen incest mods.

Do you perhaps own a copy or, better yet, a.pdf of those? I tried looking up the omnibus and original releases on amazon , but the prices are outrageous.

Are they Dragonlance's novels Weis and Hickman books' bad?

Because I tried those last year and found them atrocious.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Are they Dragonlance's novels Weis and Hickman books' bad?

No, they're much worse; the original Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman is as well-written as D&D/AD&D literature ever got.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ho...the-library-fortress-where-baldurs-gate-began

How Baldur's Gate 3 might have brought back Candlekeep, the library fortress where Baldur's Gate began​

Keeping it lit with Adam Smith

Videogames and especially role-playing games are chock-full of sheltered upbringings that go tits up. Innocent times and places like the prologue for Baldur's Gate, which unfolds in the vast, fortified monastery of Candlekeep (beware spoilers from this point on).

BioWare's first ever RPG opens with your unsuspecting Chosen One learning the ropes from the old sage Gorion. There are fetchquests that take you around the enormous citadel, bits of combat training to do, cosy formative chinwags to have with characters like your childhood friend Imoen. But it's not to last, of course: Gorion is murdered, and you must rove the Sword Coast in pursuit of his killer. When you return to Candlekeep later in the game, this once-proud bastion of learning has been filled with doppelgangers of Gorion and other acquaintances, a parade of chatbots waiting to stab you in the back.

For a while, Larian thought about rebuilding Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3, which begins many years later. And who better to take us through those plans, as we reckon with the acquisition of Gamer Network and the departure of our incredible deputy editor Alice Bell, than an old friend of RPS - one of the site's own former sages, Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer and our deputy editor till 2019, Adam Smith.

I spoke to Adam about Candlekeep following a characteristically illuminating and uncorporate presentation about Baldur's Gate 3's writing at this year's Digital Dragon's conference in Krakow. Some highlights from that presentation: "the sausage of sadness", a Larian term for when dialogue writing leads the player into a dead-end, and an audience participation element in which Adam asked people to decide whether various Baldur's Gate 3 romance scenes qualify as sex from the perspective of Youtube content guidelines, which amongst other things is the first time I have seen the other kind of sausage screened at a videogames conference, to say nothing of cunnilingus and whatever the hell Gale is doing in this scene.

Adam had many additional insights of the sexalicious persuasion when I spoke to him later. Brace yourselves for them once I have worked out what to do with them. In the meantime: the question of Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3. "I had a bunch of ideas for it," Adam explained. "I think that it's a good setting, partly because it's going back to where it all began. So that was always compelling. But also because you get an academic dungeon, and there's something interesting about that kind of library dungeon. It's vast, you know, within the lore. And the idea of having this place where you need to go to do research or something, or you need to go down into it. And then you also say, well, this is where the Bhaalspawn was raised - you know, it's very, very attractive."

I'm a fan of enormous, sinister archives myself. I'm pretty sure I own enough books to fill a dungeon of at least three levels, though one would be stocked exclusively with crumbling GSCE poetry anthologies. So why isn't Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3?

"The biggest problem was that geographically, it's on the way to Baldur's Gate," Adam continued. "So it's like, are we going to stop on the way there? Are we going to go in and then come back out again, how are we going to position it like that? The game went through a lot of different variations - one of them had you go into Baldur's Gate, and then come back out again. And then pacing-wise, it was a problem, because you have the escalation of Act 2 and the climax there. And then we're like, OK, do we, what do we want to do now? And actually, what we wanted to do was get to the city."

Some additional context for our interview: at the time, I was in the process of learning about Gamer Network's acquisition. As a consequence, I was a bit shellshocked and wobbling all over the shop with my lines of inquiry. Fortunately, Adam had come to our chat with his very own Baldur's Gate party consisting of Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who chimed in companion-dialogue style with a follow-up question. (To be clear for the benefit of any higher-ups reading, I kept my mouth shut about the acquisition during our conversation, which is a missed opportunity - given his past comments about games industry layoffs, I'd have been interested to get Vincke's take on the current state of gaming media).

"Do you remember all the stuff, all the crazy shit that you put in there?" Vincke asked Adam. "Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of crazy shit," said Adam. "There was the seer of the Far Realms. Yeah, I remember it all. Yeah."

"Because you were being very vague," Vincke pressed, journalistically. To which Adam responded: "Well, remember what I said about recycling your darlings."

("Recycling your darlings" is the redemptive Smith version of the popular creative mantra "Kill your darlings", aka ideas you love but which are fundamentally impractical and absorbing too much time and attention. During his Digital Dragons presentation, Adam illustrated this with an image of a massive pile of corpses. I can't remember if this was before or after he screened the illithid romance scene, which it turns out isn't even real sex in the eyes of Youtube. Sorry, illithidshippers.)

Thanks to Vincke's intervention, our musings on Candlekeep were able to continue. "The thing is, if you read the lore on Candlekeep, and actually, Wizards released a book called Candlekeep Mysteries, while we were in development - we got an early copy of that," Adam went on. "And it's like, any world that's full of knowledge is full of forbidden knowledge, and that's very interesting to me instantly. So there's a place in the Forgotten Realms, or the D&D universe, I should say, called the Far Realms. And some of the lore says that's where the mindflayers began - it's the cosmic horror place, you know.

"So I had this whole idea that you'd have this seer, who's sitting at the bottom of Candlekeep, who is basically staring into the Far Realms, you know, and has gone completely insane, and you have to go down there and find out what he's seen. I still think it would have been very cool. It's just the pacing for me."

"It's a game in its own right," suggested Vincke, journalistically.

"Probably, yeah," Adam continued. "But once you've got to the that key point in Act 2, we could have had a much more dense game after that, but I think that we would have exhausted people. And you know, there's a point where it becomes like, well, is this content for the sake of content? I hate the word 'content', but you know - is it actually adding to the story and the journey I'm on, where I am in my adventure? You can have too many climaxes. They're exhausting as well. I'm not talking about sex again."

Larian have now washed their hands of D&D. They're not making Baldur's Gate 4, nor are they plotting any further major additions to Baldur's Gate 3. This seems a tragedy - it's hard to imagine anybody devising a better D&D adaptation in the near-future, but it's equally hard to complain when you think about how much BG3 gives you, without (for my money, anyway) overstuffing the pudding. As Alice B wrote in our review, "in BG3, there's no baggy excess, but there's also nothing wasted, whether that be space for a joke in a description of some boots, or the chance to give one entirely optional boss his own song about kicking your ass on the soundtrack - which many players won't even hear!"

Still, if Larian do return to D&D at some stage, I can well imagine them cracking the lid on Candlekeep and perhaps, unearthing that maddened seer from the bottom of the labyrinth. "It's where the Baldur's Gate story began," Adam concluded. "So it's always going to be in your head, you know?"

Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur's Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.

 

[Fedora Master]

NEWS??

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Is the next patch , the last patch ?

 

[Old Hans]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ho...the-library-fortress-where-baldurs-gate-began

How Baldur's Gate 3 might have brought back Candlekeep, the library fortress where Baldur's Gate began​

Keeping it lit with Adam Smith

Videogames and especially role-playing games are chock-full of sheltered upbringings that go tits up. Innocent times and places like the prologue for Baldur's Gate, which unfolds in the vast, fortified monastery of Candlekeep (beware spoilers from this point on).

BioWare's first ever RPG opens with your unsuspecting Chosen One learning the ropes from the old sage Gorion. There are fetchquests that take you around the enormous citadel, bits of combat training to do, cosy formative chinwags to have with characters like your childhood friend Imoen. But it's not to last, of course: Gorion is murdered, and you must rove the Sword Coast in pursuit of his killer. When you return to Candlekeep later in the game, this once-proud bastion of learning has been filled with doppelgangers of Gorion and other acquaintances, a parade of chatbots waiting to stab you in the back.

For a while, Larian thought about rebuilding Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3, which begins many years later. And who better to take us through those plans, as we reckon with the acquisition of Gamer Network and the departure of our incredible deputy editor Alice Bell, than an old friend of RPS - one of the site's own former sages, Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer and our deputy editor till 2019, Adam Smith.

I spoke to Adam about Candlekeep following a characteristically illuminating and uncorporate presentation about Baldur's Gate 3's writing at this year's Digital Dragon's conference in Krakow. Some highlights from that presentation: "the sausage of sadness", a Larian term for when dialogue writing leads the player into a dead-end, and an audience participation element in which Adam asked people to decide whether various Baldur's Gate 3 romance scenes qualify as sex from the perspective of Youtube content guidelines, which amongst other things is the first time I have seen the other kind of sausage screened at a videogames conference, to say nothing of cunnilingus and whatever the hell Gale is doing in this scene.

Adam had many additional insights of the sexalicious persuasion when I spoke to him later. Brace yourselves for them once I have worked out what to do with them. In the meantime: the question of Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3. "I had a bunch of ideas for it," Adam explained. "I think that it's a good setting, partly because it's going back to where it all began. So that was always compelling. But also because you get an academic dungeon, and there's something interesting about that kind of library dungeon. It's vast, you know, within the lore. And the idea of having this place where you need to go to do research or something, or you need to go down into it. And then you also say, well, this is where the Bhaalspawn was raised - you know, it's very, very attractive."

I'm a fan of enormous, sinister archives myself. I'm pretty sure I own enough books to fill a dungeon of at least three levels, though one would be stocked exclusively with crumbling GSCE poetry anthologies. So why isn't Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3?

"The biggest problem was that geographically, it's on the way to Baldur's Gate," Adam continued. "So it's like, are we going to stop on the way there? Are we going to go in and then come back out again, how are we going to position it like that? The game went through a lot of different variations - one of them had you go into Baldur's Gate, and then come back out again. And then pacing-wise, it was a problem, because you have the escalation of Act 2 and the climax there. And then we're like, OK, do we, what do we want to do now? And actually, what we wanted to do was get to the city."

Some additional context for our interview: at the time, I was in the process of learning about Gamer Network's acquisition. As a consequence, I was a bit shellshocked and wobbling all over the shop with my lines of inquiry. Fortunately, Adam had come to our chat with his very own Baldur's Gate party consisting of Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who chimed in companion-dialogue style with a follow-up question. (To be clear for the benefit of any higher-ups reading, I kept my mouth shut about the acquisition during our conversation, which is a missed opportunity - given his past comments about games industry layoffs, I'd have been interested to get Vincke's take on the current state of gaming media).

"Do you remember all the stuff, all the crazy shit that you put in there?" Vincke asked Adam. "Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of crazy shit," said Adam. "There was the seer of the Far Realms. Yeah, I remember it all. Yeah."

"Because you were being very vague," Vincke pressed, journalistically. To which Adam responded: "Well, remember what I said about recycling your darlings."

("Recycling your darlings" is the redemptive Smith version of the popular creative mantra "Kill your darlings", aka ideas you love but which are fundamentally impractical and absorbing too much time and attention. During his Digital Dragons presentation, Adam illustrated this with an image of a massive pile of corpses. I can't remember if this was before or after he screened the illithid romance scene, which it turns out isn't even real sex in the eyes of Youtube. Sorry, illithidshippers.)

Thanks to Vincke's intervention, our musings on Candlekeep were able to continue. "The thing is, if you read the lore on Candlekeep, and actually, Wizards released a book called Candlekeep Mysteries, while we were in development - we got an early copy of that," Adam went on. "And it's like, any world that's full of knowledge is full of forbidden knowledge, and that's very interesting to me instantly. So there's a place in the Forgotten Realms, or the D&D universe, I should say, called the Far Realms. And some of the lore says that's where the mindflayers began - it's the cosmic horror place, you know.

"So I had this whole idea that you'd have this seer, who's sitting at the bottom of Candlekeep, who is basically staring into the Far Realms, you know, and has gone completely insane, and you have to go down there and find out what he's seen. I still think it would have been very cool. It's just the pacing for me."

"It's a game in its own right," suggested Vincke, journalistically.

"Probably, yeah," Adam continued. "But once you've got to the that key point in Act 2, we could have had a much more dense game after that, but I think that we would have exhausted people. And you know, there's a point where it becomes like, well, is this content for the sake of content? I hate the word 'content', but you know - is it actually adding to the story and the journey I'm on, where I am in my adventure? You can have too many climaxes. They're exhausting as well. I'm not talking about sex again."

Larian have now washed their hands of D&D. They're not making Baldur's Gate 4, nor are they plotting any further major additions to Baldur's Gate 3. This seems a tragedy - it's hard to imagine anybody devising a better D&D adaptation in the near-future, but it's equally hard to complain when you think about how much BG3 gives you, without (for my money, anyway) overstuffing the pudding. As Alice B wrote in our review, "in BG3, there's no baggy excess, but there's also nothing wasted, whether that be space for a joke in a description of some boots, or the chance to give one entirely optional boss his own song about kicking your ass on the soundtrack - which many players won't even hear!"

Still, if Larian do return to D&D at some stage, I can well imagine them cracking the lid on Candlekeep and perhaps, unearthing that maddened seer from the bottom of the labyrinth. "It's where the Baldur's Gate story began," Adam concluded. "So it's always going to be in your head, you know?"

Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur's Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.

what a pointless article. "we could have done this, but we didn't"

 

[AshenNedra]

Are they Dragonlance's novels Weis and Hickman books' bad?

No, they're much worse; the original Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman is as well-written as D&D/AD&D literature ever got.

Ah. then, thank you, but no thank you, I guess.

Maybe it's the themes touched upon by W and H, that I don't like?

The magic system was nice. The planes were beautifully described too, and somewhat creative.

The Death Gates' cycle was overall good, but I was always waiting for Haplo, or his Lord, to be somewhat useful. and not for super Alfred, the Messiah, to save the day.



Are the RS Drizzt's books more varied, 'exotic', and, dare I say, fun?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Ah. then, thank you, but no thank you, I guess.

Maybe it's the themes touched upon by W and H, that I don't like?

The magic system was nice. The planes were beautifully described too, and somewhat creative.

The Death Gates' cycle was overall good, but I was always waiting for Haplo, or his Lord, to be somewhat useful. and not for super Alfred, the Messiah, to save the day.



Are the RS Drizzt's books more varied, 'exotic', and, dare I say, fun?

You might be confusing the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy (and the sequel Legends trilogy) with later series by Weis and Hickman, such as the Death Gate cycle of 7 books, that had no relation to D&D/AD&D. Dragonlance was conceived by TSR as a linked series of 12 adventure modules forming an epic Tolkienesque fantasy, with the associated novel trilogy an experiment that proved wildly successful, ultimately giving rise to a vast quantity of D&D/AD&D literature, including just about every setting published by TSR, but of generally declining quality.

R.A. Salvatore's novels apparently have their fans.

 

[Infinitron]

More from Digital Dragons: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...ng-development-then-immediately-regretted-it/

Baldur's Gate 3 director bragged it could be the "RPG of the decade" during development - then immediately regretted it​

Larian ran into a "sh*tload of trouble"

Baldur's Gate 3's director has reflected on the game's early development process, and why he regretted saying it could be the RPG of the decade.

At a presentation at Digital Dragons in Poland, Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke revealed to attendees how the RPG looked in the early stages of development. Vincke revealed Larian originally wanted to have a "dungeon master" tell the player what was going on via voiceover, but Vincke felt it was a "little too ambitious" for Larian to handle.

Baldur's Gate 3's early development years also proved how "inexperienced" Larian was with making cinematics, Vincke further revealed. "But we felt really, really, really confident because we had already made two RPGs, they were hit RPGs, what could go wrong?" Vincke continued.

"I was so confident, in fact, that I'm gonna do something I would never do again," the Baldur's Gate 3 director continued. Vincke then played an old clip of himself presenting Larian's plans for Baldur's Gate 3 at an internal meeting to owner Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, during which he claimed Baldur's Gate 3 could be the "RPG of the decade."

"Almost instantly, I regretted my words," Vincke said of the older clip. "So we got into a whole shitload of trouble. It began in the first year - so you can see nothing is moving," the director continued, playing a clip of a very early cinematic design in Baldur's Gate 3.

"The team just kept on having meeting after meeting where they wanted to perfect everything that they had done wrong in the past. The problem is, when you chase perfection, you can spend a lot of time discussing things. Ultimately, we got over this phase of discussion after more than a year, and we started producing stuff, and then we ran into a whole bunch of other problems," Vincke continued.

The "number of features" was one of the major problems Larian had to deal with early on, as was the growth of the studio itself to deal with the amount of features. Inexperience with cinematics was a major issue as well, as was the fact that Larian basically didn't have a pipeline in place for creating cinematics in Baldur's Gate 3, Vincke further revealed.

Another problem was that the programming team was "lying through their teeth," Vincke added, saying that if a programmer asks you for "500 days" to get something right, they basically have no idea what they're doing. But the best approach to this was apparently just to "leave them alone," the Baldur's Gate 3 director also revealed. No pressure, then.

Add in that Larian needed to constantly optimize performance as Baldur's Gate 3 was shipping on so many platforms, and you're just beginning to scratch the surface of the problems. Larian had a headcount of around 120 people when Vincke proclaimed that it could be the "RPG of the decade" - by the end of development, this figure had ballooned to around 450.

Maybe Larian's next game might be a little less chaotic in its approach, now that its developers have all this experience under their belts. Or, rather, that should be 'both games,' because the studio is working on two "very ambitious RPGs" right now, and it just opened a brand new studio in Warsaw, Poland, to bring these plans to fruition.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...thing-to-say-they-have-to-do-their-own-thing/

Baldur's Gate 3 director isn't giving advice to whoever makes Baldur's Gate 4, but he did have one thing to say: "They have to do their own thing"​

Swen Vincke doesn't want to "poison the well" for the next developer

Baldur's Gate 3's director isn't giving the development team for the next game in the RPG series any advice - he says "they have to do their own thing" instead.

GamesRadar+ recently spoke to Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland, and asked the game director and Larian studio head if he had any advice for the team making Baldur's Gate 4. This follows from Larian saying it was done with the RPG series after Baldur's Gate 3, and would instead be an entirely new game for its next project.

"It's gonna be up to them. I mean, they have to do their own thing, right," Vincke said when asked if he had any advice for the team making the eventual Baldur's Gate 4. "So I'm not going to poison the well, for them to have to take advice. So I look forward to seeing what they're gonna do with it. I honestly, I there's so many things that you could do. So they have a realm of possibility waiting for them."

Elsewhere earlier today, Larian announced the opening of a new studio in Warsaw, Poland, to help the developer make two "very ambitious new RPGs." When asked for further details about the two new games, Vincke only said that Larian was "still figuring things out," but that neither game would be "small," which probably isn't a surprise from the developer of Baldur's Gate 3.

For Vincke, though, the scale of a game depends on what it needs. "The scale of [Baldur's Gate 3] was really what the game needed, at least the way that we were making it," Vincke said, adding that he hopes the next two games don't "explode" in size in the same way, "because otherwise we're all gonna die." Here's hoping it doesn't come to that.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ba...llow-our-gut-then-its-going-to-be-a-disaster/

Baldur's Gate 3 devs had to overcome "incredible pressure" when starting its "very ambitious" new RPG: "If we can't follow our gut," then "it's going to be a disaster"​

"We have to focus on making something that we want to play"

Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admits the team felt "incredible pressure" to match the success of Baldur's Gate 3 on its next RPG at one point, though thankfully "we're past that phase now."

Speaking to GamesRadar+ following his keynote at the Digital Dragons conference, Vincke touches on the weight of success and how they've already managed to move past it so that they may continue to work on new RPGs unencumbered.

"It certainly did in the beginning," Vincke says when asked if Baldur's Gate 3's success has put pressure on the team regarding new projects. "But I think we're past that phase now. There was this moment where we felt incredible pressure and then I said, 'Guys, just forget about all of it. Right? We're just going to make a game again. And we'll focus on that.'

"And obviously, it's very ambitious. But if we can't follow our gut instinct because we're struggling to deal with external pressures or what people are going to expect, we're never going to make it; it's going to be a disaster. So we have to focus on making something that we want to play. And if it's that, then we'll be fine."

Prior to our interview, Vincke shared during a talk that, at one point, he said Baldur's Gate 3 could be the "RPG of the decade" while presenting the studio's vision to IP holders Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. Given the awards the game has won, the claim seems fair now, though Vincke still immediately regretted the comment back then as he was soon to find out just how much trouble Larian would run into trying to get the game made.

"RPG of the decade" or not, though, Larian isn't letting the success distract from what's next.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...-was-running-out-we-were-in-a-lot-of-trouble/

Baldur's Gate 3 director refused to sacrifice quality even amid concerns the RPG would be "impossible to finish" and budget was running out: "We were in a lot of trouble"​

Larian was eventually forced to change up its development pipelines

The director of Baldur's Gate 3 says his studio was forced to change its tactics when developers became concerned that it would be "impossible to finish it."

Speaking at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland, Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke outlined the processes that developer Larian used to create its smash hit - and the problems they caused. Using the example of the 9,500 cinematics in the game, Vincke noted that each time something changed in the story, all of those cinematics might need changing too. And with each change, the team would need to review their work and make improvements.

"You might have something that you would rate, when you review it, 45% on Metacritic," Vincke explains. "And then what are you going to do? You're going to say it's not good enough, we're going to do it again." The quality might jump, and then jump again on another pass, but that takes a huge amount of time across an entire game.

"And so the interesting question that you start getting in development is 'When do I say stop?'" Vinke continues. "When do I say either 'we're going to cancel this thing and we're going to rescope' or 'we're just going to keep on hitting it until we hit that 90% barrier'? But right now, you really understand that we didn't want to accept anything that was under at least a particular benchmark."

With thousands of cinematics and features being developed at the same time, however, Larian's system "wasn't working out as well as it could." The sheer size of the game meant that "we got into this situation, we were in a lot of trouble. As time went by, we said, 'We can't just keep doing this, changing things here without thinking of what's going to happen somewhere unpredictable'." An innocuous door model change in one part of the game, for instance, might ruin a cinematic somewhere else.

"There was a moment where, literally, when you looked at it, you said, 'we're never going to finish this game. It's going to be impossible to finish it.'" Larian refused, however, to sacrifice quality in order to ship its game, even when Vincke acknowledged that budget might start to become an issue: "We just said 'no, the game needs these things, so we're going to be doing this, we need to create breathing space to get the game to the quality level that it's going to need because otherwise, it's just not going to work out'."

Eventually, Larian created that breathing space, giving individual teams more power over their own quality control to streamline development across the board. And the refusal to sacrifice on quality eventually paid off, with millions of sales and a record-breaking awards run that cemented Baldur's Gate 3 as a timeless classic.

 

[Cohesion]

Another problem was that the programming team was "lying through their teeth," Vincke added, saying that if a programmer asks you for "500 days" to get something right, they basically have no idea what they're doing. But the best approach to this was apparently just to "leave them alone," the Baldur's Gate 3 director also revealed. No pressure, then.

 

[Mortmal]

Solasta is technically a better adaptation because it actually sticks to the rules.

Solasta is boring.

You both are right.
Solasta gives a better impression of how tabletop D&D is played.
But it's base campaigns are pretty weak in story and encounter design.

So the best option would be to play player made modules. For example, Artyoan 's.

Solasta follows the tabletop rules very well, except for one point: unlimited rests and encounters being handled one by one, except at the very end of the last DLC. With no attrition, you are at full resources all the time. Then, people save scum and like to lie and brag and say it's easy not mentioning how many time they reload. If the game only allowed saving at certain checkpoints with limited rests, it would be much more deadly and exciting. However, this isn't possible in any new game because most people would complain loudly if you changed that. Few players can handle Honor Mode in BG3, which is the same thing I am advising for Solasta. So, you end up with something very mainstream, acceptable for Game Pass and YouTubers, but with no challenge at all—situations and encounters seen hundreds of times before. Of course, it looks easy and bland. Yet, despite these flaws, it's still one of the top RPGs, which shows how low the bar is. Player made modules are not doing any better , none of them.

 

[Nortar]

Solasta is technically a better adaptation because it actually sticks to the rules.

Solasta is boring.

You both are right.
Solasta gives a better impression of how tabletop D&D is played.
But it's base campaigns are pretty weak in story and encounter design.

Solasta follows the tabletop rules very well, except for one point: unlimited rests and encounters being handled one by one, except at the very end of the last DLC. With no attrition, you are at full resources all the time. Then, people save scum and like to lie and brag and say it's easy not mentioning how many time they reload. If the game only allowed saving at certain checkpoints with limited rests, it would be much more deadly and exciting. However, this isn't possible in any new game because most people would complain loudly if you changed that. Few players can handle Honor Mode in BG3, which is the same thing I am advising for Solasta. So, you end up with something very mainstream, acceptable for Game Pass and YouTubers, but with no challenge at all—situations and encounters seen hundreds of times before. Of course, it looks easy and bland. Yet, despite these flaws, it's still one of the top RPGs, which shows how low the bar is. Player made modules are not doing any better , none of them.

The base D&D rules don't regulate how rests should be handled.
There are some guidelines, but nothing set in stone afair.
It's up to DM to decide if he would allow adventures to sleep in front of Vampire Lord's door without punishing their recklessness.

Personally I limit myself to resting only in places and situations I myself consider to be logically possible.
But my habits were formed by years of tabletop gaming with a particulary cruel oldskul and inventive DM.

But why do you care how other people get their fun?
If someone runs a party of min-maxed wizards, rests after every encounter and boast about the game being too easy,
how does it ruin your personal experience of try-harding with a party of gimped rangers who only sleep once per two levels or something?
To each his own.

 

[Desiderius]

But why do you care how other people get their fun?
If someone runs a party of min-maxed wizards, rests after every encounter and boast about the game being too easy,
how does it ruin your personal experience of try-harding with a party of gimped rangers who only sleep once per two levels or something?

Kind of tired of rheotical questions myself.

Maybe attempt an answer as if it were real.

 

[Lacrymas]

But why do you care how other people get their fun?
If someone runs a party of min-maxed wizards, rests after every encounter and boast about the game being too easy,
how does it ruin your personal experience of try-harding with a party of gimped rangers who only sleep once per two levels or something?
To each his own.

Because it seems that only these kinds of people affect video game development. We have 2-3 examples in video gaming where you can't rest after every encounter and breeze through the game like that. It doesn't only have an impact оn difficulty, though, it also directly dictates how the game is played. Having full resources for every encounter means the optimal way to play is to find a tactic which works in the vast majority of encounters and do that over and over again. QED PoE2. From my many years of gaming, I've come to realize most of the challenge in cRPGs, and frankly tabletop RPGs, comes from resource management and attrition.

 

[Mortmal]

Solasta is technically a better adaptation because it actually sticks to the rules.

Solasta is boring.

You both are right.
Solasta gives a better impression of how tabletop D&D is played.
But it's base campaigns are pretty weak in story and encounter design.

Solasta follows the tabletop rules very well, except for one point: unlimited rests and encounters being handled one by one, except at the very end of the last DLC. With no attrition, you are at full resources all the time. Then, people save scum and like to lie and brag and say it's easy not mentioning how many time they reload. If the game only allowed saving at certain checkpoints with limited rests, it would be much more deadly and exciting. However, this isn't possible in any new game because most people would complain loudly if you changed that. Few players can handle Honor Mode in BG3, which is the same thing I am advising for Solasta. So, you end up with something very mainstream, acceptable for Game Pass and YouTubers, but with no challenge at all—situations and encounters seen hundreds of times before. Of course, it looks easy and bland. Yet, despite these flaws, it's still one of the top RPGs, which shows how low the bar is. Player made modules are not doing any better , none of them.

The base D&D rules don't regulate how rests should be handled.
There are some guidelines, but nothing set in stone afair.
It's up to DM to decide if he would allow adventures to sleep in front of Vampire Lord's door without punishing their recklessness.

Personally I limit myself to resting only in places and situations I myself consider to be logically possible.
But my habits were formed by years of tabletop gaming with a particulary cruel oldskul and inventive DM.

But why do you care how other people get their fun?
If someone runs a party of min-maxed wizards, rests after every encounter and boast about the game being too easy,
how does it ruin your personal experience of try-harding with a party of gimped rangers who only sleep once per two levels or something?
To each his own.

You start to care about how people are having their fun when your tastes are completely ignored and theirs become the standard. I'd prefer more thrilling dungeon delving, something like the combat demo before the Kickstarter. However, they are going to listen to the YouTuber who is failing at the game, which ends up with adding karmic dice. Why even roll then? Just give the guy an auto-hit. None of my suggestions were ever added to Solasta, and the difficulty slider is just some HP bloating for a system that really doesn't need more HP. The guidelines are not set in stone, but they make a far more entertaining game for me.